Michael Marlow
Michael Marlow was born October 6, 1953 in an army hospital at Camp Rucker, in Ozark, Alabama. After six months in the army, he was brought up in the Bronx and Yonkers, the first-born in a Roman Catholic, three-quarters Irish, one-quarter Italian family.
He attended Manhattan College from 1971 through 1973, going walkabout till 1988, he returned graduating finally in 1990 with a B.A. in Communications.
Journey
Early
On leaving in the winter of ’73, he moved to the Berkshires, made metal sculptures, pumped gas, worked as a waiter, played cards, worked construction, created a used book store with his sister Jeri, selling it after a year. Was wooed into the insurance business like his father, and his father’s father, he survived by skiing under the lights at night in winter, and full court basketball runs during lunch time, till leaving in the winter of ‘77 for Fort Lauderdale. He worked in a restaurant at night and played tennis during the day, which an old girl friend and a hippie ex-touring pro had introduced him to a few years earlier. Returning in the summer he cut firewood till winter and headed south again.
He spent much time over these years and the years to come in the beauty and silence of nature. He read “The Prophet” amid the sand dunes of an island during a weekend party; Fox, and Goldsmith among the rocks and water of Glendale Falls; “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by the clay courts surrounded by mountains, leafs turning, and the late fall sun filtering down; the “Tao Te Ching” by a lake so still you’d think you where looking at the sky; “Prison to Praise”, Ram Dass, “God Calling”, “Illusions”, the Psalms, the Prophets, New Testament writers, Buddhist writers, Christian writers, Sufi writers, a weekend on a mountain top with Pir Vilayat, a daily walk through the woods to a stream, all from a desire to know the truth. He also went to some charismatic meetings, and for a time was a member of a community that met on Sunday’s at an extraordinary chapel where the Jesuit’s said Mass.
Middle
Then in 1980 while working as an actor in a play being work-shopped in the Berkshires, and living in a small artist conclave, one of the other actors handed him a copy of “The Urantia Book” saying ‘I think you’d be interested in this.’
Putting on a suit and tie again to earn a living, he survived by listening to Bach, Vivaldi, Copeland, Mozart, and reading Emerson and Thoreau in the Library during lunch, full court basketball runs, and skiing under the lights at night in winter. Finally able to lose the suit again, he began studying psychology and therapeutic techniques from primal scream to classic analysis, sparked by reading Alice Miller and having to deal with emotions coming unrepressed.
Returning to Manhattan College in 1988, after a fifteen-year walkabout, having come to terms with a truth-seeking curiosity and partying till dawn, he graduated in 1990 with a B.A. in Communications, and promptly went to work as a carpenter on a framing crew building a mansion on the Green River.
Later
He began working as an actor again, was hired as a private therapist for the son of a trainer of therapists at Harvard, and began teaching tennis again. For the following years some combination of these three would carry him through to become an author and editor, travel the country, read the Western Canon, hang on the mountain tops, experience the canyons, and make a daily pilgrimage to Bash Bish Falls once upon a summer.
